Measuring customer satisfaction is the best way to find and fix problems, track customer sentiment and improve customer experience.
Do it right and you’ll build a strong reputation for high quality service – the essential ingredient for sustained business growth and profitability.
But get it wrong (as many do) or do it for the wrong reasons (as many do) and you’ll get no benefit. In fact a poorly designed satisfaction survey, with little thought given to satisfactory follow up, will frustrate customers and may even send satisfaction lower.
Fortunately it’s not hard to achieve impressive results – you just need to rethink your approach. In this post you’ll learn:
The best answer to ‘How to measure customer satisfaction?’ starts with a clear understanding of ‘Why to measure customer satisfaction?’, and that might not be what you’ve always assumed.
These are some common reasons why companies measure customer satisfaction, and they’re all wrong:
None of these things improves customer experience or makes your business perform better, but unfortunately we encounter them all too often.
In fact putting too much emphasis on measuring and analysing satisfaction, and not enough on gearing up to continually improve it, can actually make things worse for both customer and company. For example:
Brutal truth #1: If it doesn’t benefit customers, it doesn’t benefit the business.
So what’s the right reason for measuring customer satisfaction?
The only reason you should be measuring customer satisfaction is in order to improve customer experience in a way which helps you meet your existing, primary, measurable business goals. Such as increasing the number of new customers acquired, reducing the number of customers lost, increasing customer spend, increasing margin, and reducing costs. In a not-for-profit organisation it might be all about improving quality for service users.
That’s because customers who are habitually satisfied with a brand are more loyal, less price-sensitive, and more likely to put their personal reputation on the line and endorse you to family, friends or colleagues.
Failing to grasp its purpose and value will mean it’s the first casualty when budgets are squeezed, when it should be the last.
The most important lesson to learn is that satisfaction is subjective and it is a proxy for a range of other, much more important factors. It should be measured in order to identify and improve the (underlying) things that influence it (like quality, speed, convenience, simplicity, friendliness…) rather than in order to increase the satisfaction score itself. It’s a subtle distinction, but one which makes the difference between success and failure.
Brutal truth #2: You cannot improve customer experience by improving your satisfaction score. You have to identify, measure and fix the underlying factors.
In medium to large companies, measuring customer satisfaction becomes a lot more complex than, perhaps, a simple annual survey. With multiple departments, cradle to grave customer touchpoints, and varied product or service lines, satisfaction can mean a lot of different things.
Add in business-to-business, with multiple stakeholders (service users, recommenders, budget holders) and possibly intermediary business partners too, and the picture gets even more complicated.
So how do you actually measure it in a way that’s reliable, scalable, and – most importantly – actionable?
Let’s break it down.
Every company has its own priorities. What matters is aligning your definition of satisfaction with the outcomes you care about – like repeat purchases, upsells, or referrals.
For most of us as customers, this just means doing the job I’ve paid you for, and doing it quickly, reliably, personably and cost effectively. The ‘job’ is your product or service, backed up by any information I need, and supported so that any problems along the way are fast and easy to resolve.
If you get it right first time, most of the time, and fix it brilliantly when you don’t, the reward will be an equally brilliant, loyal customer.
To define what customer satisfaction looks like for your business and how you measure up, you’ll need to consider what’s important to customers at each stage in the customer journey – that is, at each stage of their dealings with you.
Higher satisfaction scores is the wrong target. Your goal must be to improve the things that customers care about.
Satisfaction metrics can give you consistent, scalable insights. Very often you’ll benefit from using a combination of them, and we’ve a detailed guide to help you choose between them. In the meantime, here are the three big ones:
“How satisfied were you with your experience?”
Tip: Also ask for comments to discover what customers like and don’t like.
“How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?”
Tip: Don’t ask this question too early in the relationship. Customers need to know you well before they can answer, so asking too soon makes them feel awkward.
Gain actionable insights by analysing comments from detractors, passives and promoters.
“How easy was it to do what you needed?”
Tip: This not only helps you streamline service for customers, it can also highlight areas of complexity and potential for cost savings.
The best insights come in context – specifically, at the times when customers are most likely to have feedback that they want to give, not months later in an annual survey, nor when you arbitrarily decide you’d like to collect some feedback. Our guide describes the role of relationship and transactional surveys, as well as how to decide the best timing.
A simple, well-timed survey will get better response rates and more useful feedback.
Phone calls and a spreadsheet might do the job in a startup, or maybe a general purpose survey tool like SurveyMonkey, but to avoid the need for extra headcount larger companies need scalable tools that cover all functions in a business.
Voice of the customer (VoC) software will be needed to meet the broader requirements of larger companies. Our guide explains how to choose VoC software.
Key capabilities to look for in a VoC platform (compared to survey software):
Qualtrics, Medallia, CustomerSure, Zendesk (for CSAT), Delighted (for NPS)
Broad averages are not enough.
Combine quantitative scores with qualitative insights to get the full story.
Collecting feedback is only half the job. The real magic happens when you act on it.
A closed-loop feedback system drives internal accountability and builds customer trust.
Brutal truth #3: You can’t improve satisfaction just by measuring it.
Treat customer satisfaction as a business-critical metric:
Brutal truth #4: Customer feedback shouldn’t be restricted to a research or analysis function, it should be built into real-time, day-to-day, business-as-usual processes.
Create a culture of listening and acting
Tools and metrics matter. But culture matters more.
Encourage your teams to:
Listening to customers isn’t just a practice. It’s a competitive advantage.
Brutal truth #5: Low scores make you more money than high scores – learn to embrace them! You get to find & fix problems and save customers you would otherwise lose.
Here are some other articles on measuring customer satisfaction which you might find helpful, with our view on what they get right and what advice you might want to temper.
This is a thought-provoking guide, but as you might expect from a vendor steeped in the market research sector, it’s heavy on statistics and the academic side. For our money, it’s too heavy on the measurement and too light on practically improving satisfaction which, as we’ve said, is the only reason you should ever measure it in the first place.
Take the positives, but remember that customer satisfaction is about people, emotions and relationships, not spreadsheets, so you’ll need to find those answers elsewhere.
This is a useful overview which explains a lot of the key concepts. Typically for a vendor that sells pure survey software, the focus is on surveys and what you can do with survey results. That’s partly helpful, but it falls into the trap of over-complicating the analysis, for example the section on ‘SERVQUAL’. As soon as you start combining abstract, subjective scores to produce another score, you’re on very thin ice mathematically and unfortunately by this point you’ve completely lost the plot on what’s important to customers.
Again, learn from the good, but when you start weighting, combining or averaging satisfaction scores loud warning bells should be ringing.
Salesforce is a titan of the CRM industry and this is a good read, focusing as it does more on the value than the method of measuring customer satisfaction.
We like the commercial emphasis, but we’re less keen when they stray into the same territory as Qualtrics and start overthinking it with artificial concepts – in this case, ‘attitudinal, affective, cognitive and behavioural’ customer satisfaction.
This completely ignores the reality understood by every frontline customer experience professional that satisfaction, like trust, takes years to earn yet can be lost in an instant as a result of real world events and people’s behaviours. So placing confidence in carefully calculated, multi-factor scores is like building on sand. Maybe skip that section!
This one’s probably the pick of the bunch. There’s good coverage of the aspects we think are important and a healthy emphasis on improving satisfaction to derive commercial benefits. It covers a lot of ground well.
If we were to change one thing, it would be to change the first step from ‘Define Research Focus’ to ‘Define Business Goals’ to signify that Return on Investment (ROI) is an important outcome. But we’ll forgive them that one because they’re a pure-play survey tool rather than a broader featured customer experience platform, and for their home territory of research that would be the correct starting point.
Measuring customer satisfaction in a medium to large company isn’t just about surveys—it’s about building a system that helps you understand, respond to, and improve the customer experience at scale.
When done right, it becomes more than a metric. It becomes a driver of loyalty, innovation, and growth.
Need help getting started? Tools like CustomerSure can help you gather actionable feedback, close the loop, and drive continuous improvement.
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